Digital media business evolving

August 25, 2012|By GENE STOWE | South Bend Tribune Correspondent

GRANGER -- After 16 years as a third-grade teacher and years producing and directing events at Granger Community Church, Jeff Petersen combined his experiences and self-taught business expertise to create MindStorm Digital.

Petersen's broad set of talents -- video, photography, writing, teaching, imagining -- provided a strong base through the company's first two years, and business seems to be accelerating, he says.

His high skill level and carefully cultivated connections have, among other things, given him free access to the U.S. Olympic women's gymnastics team at final tryouts in Chicago last year.

Petersen, a Michiana native and 1982 St. Joseph High School graduate who earned a degree from IU Bloomington, taught at Mary Frank Elementary until his volunteer work at Granger Community Church developed into a full-time job.

"I've been involved in this for most of my life," he says. "This particular job I'm doing right now started probably with teaching. I would do plays and a lot of writing. That was a big part of my teaching -- making learning fun and interesting, trying to change it up in that way.

"Then I started working for the church as a volunteer media and production director. That job grew more and more even while I was teaching. We started back then doing slide shows. That's when I started doing photography. That was my initial training."

The experience included producing high-quality videos in the early days of technology, when photographs had to go to Chicago to be made into slides and digital cameras were new.

"I knew the potential was going to be there," he says, adding that he sought out advice from high-level professionals in Hollywood and sent professional photographs to people who had performed at the church, building a network.

"As a profession, we evolved," he says. "I would seek out the smartest people I could find, the most creative people I could find. For all those years, I spent every day having to be creative as a profession. I was part of the main production team."

Petersen has done topical projects for Memorial Hospital on early childhood brain development, nanotechnology, and, most recently cyberbullying, which has developed into a comic book created with Robinson Community Learning Center participants and used on South Bend Community School Corp. billboards for an anti-bullying campaign.

Long habits of listening and learning lie behind the successful productions, Petersen says.

"My goal was to learn," he says. "I would seek out these professionals in the industry," including a visit to Industrial Light & Magic. "Whatever I could do to seek out and learn things from the best in the world and try to adapt it to whatever I was doing at the time and then teach it. I use everything I've ever learned in what I do."